ShareThis

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” ― Paul Krugman

Support A Liberal's Hit List

Twitter Feed

About

Hi, I'm Bret. I'm a very Progressive Liberal. I believe in the truth behind science and mathematics. I believe supposed "creationists" are just too ignorant to understand actual science, and fall back to their magic storybook because real science is too hard for their itsy-bitsy lizard brains. I believe in equality for all people; straight, gay, bi, trans, white, black, brown it does not matter. We are all humans on this Earth for a limited time. Celebrate diversity and enjoy with other's bring to your life. End of story. ;-)

Friday, October 30, 2009

By Catharine RichertPolitiFact

Skeptics of climate change often say the world has been cooling in the past decade.

Conservative pundit Mary Matalin made that claim on CNN's Situation Room on Oct. 22, 2009. Matalin warned that the Obama administration is pushing too many big legislative initiatives such as a cap-and-trade plan to slow global warming when the administration should be focusing on the deficit.

"If they care about reducing the deficit, which should be their No. 1 priority ... they're not going to be able to do this — all this other nonsense, cap and trade and all the rest of it. Too much, too fast," Matalin said. "Climate change is a fake issue anyway. ... There is not consensus science on what is causing global climate change. There is climate change, but for the last decade the climate has been cooling. There is the science. There is the data on that. They want to do this because they like to have all these programs being controlled by the government."

So, Matalin acknowledges that the Earth's temperature is changing, but she's not so sure that those changes are man-made. We'll save the debate over whether climate change is caused by human activity for another day. For now, we're going to check Matalin's claim that the Earth has been cooling in recent years.

Last spring, we checked a similar claim made by the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank. The group claimed that there has been no net global warming for over a decade; we found that False because the climate scientists we spoke with said that, while temperatures have remained relatively static over the last decade, very little can be learned about climate change in a 10-year window....(Remainder.)